Meet Teleskope: Moving data security from alerts to remediation
Modern enterprises must manage exploding volumes of sensitive data just as the stakes of sensitive data protection reach all-time highs. Teleskope, founded by former Airbnb security engineer Elizabeth Nammour, was built to solve that gap. Teleskope looks at data security as not just a technical problem but a human one that requires automation designed around how people actually work.
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Why we invested
Teleskope’s journey may be just beginning, but the three year old company is fast rewriting the rules for enterprise data security. The company is leading a shift from detection to automated remediation, helping organizations not just find data risks but fix them in real time. This is especially important as artificial intelligence accelerates data proliferation and amplifies the risks of exposure.
Four years ago, enterprises were already struggling with data sprawl problems, according to Nammour. Now with AI, it’s much easier for attackers to gain control of that sensitive data, search for sensitive data or for that data to get surfaced to them.
Teleskope is redefining data security by focusing on remediation rather than just detection so that customers don’t just see the problem but fix it automatically.
According to Karl Alomar, M13’s managing partner, that shift couldn’t be more timely.
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Product innovation and automated remediation
From day one, Nammour’s north star was building security software that actually works.
Teleskope spent its first two years building, iterating and learning deeply from customers. The team found that most data security solutions are overly generic, flagging irrelevant risks and offering no clear path to remediation. Even when these tools identify real issues, they rarely provide insight into a company’s unique risk landscape or actionable next steps.
Teleskope takes a different approach. Its platform ingests and understands a company’s data security and management policies, then uses agentic automation to act with the intelligence and context of a human security team.
For example, it can detect data that hasn’t been accessed in a decade and safely delete it, lowering storage costs, reducing risk, and ensuring compliance with internal and regulatory data-retention rules.
Teleskope aims to go one step further by training its agents to ingest and enforce a company’s data management, security and privacy policies in real time. For Alomar, this is where Teleskope stands apart. "No other DSPM (data security posture management) offers end-to-end remediation. Everything is manual," he said. "What Lizzy and Teleskope have done is shift the security paradigm from dashboard and alerts to real fixes.”
From Airbnb to autonomous security
Nammour didn’t set out to be a security founder.
“Unlike cybersecurity leaders who come from military or traditional infosec backgrounds, I’m an operator at heart, a software engineer who loves to solve hard problems,” she said.
She joined Airbnb in 2017 as a software engineer and, through a "reverse pitch" team selection process, found herself in security. “When I joined the data security team, I realized how uniquely interesting the space is,” Nammour said. “It’s this mix of deeply technical challenges — like operating at petabyte scale and maintaining accuracy — intertwined with human and organizational complexity.”
That complexity is exactly what makes data security so difficult. Tools must operate at massive scale while understanding how a company works, something most tools fail to do. When faced with the challenge of data sprawl at Airbnb, Nammour’s team evaluated existing products but found them insufficient. “We started manually labeling hundreds of thousands of columns in our data warehouse,” she recalled. “It was clear that it didn't scale.”
So the team built an in-house solution, a luxury few companies can afford. “At Airbnb, we were fortunate that our security engineers were also software engineers, so we could build a platform ourselves,” she said. “But 99% of security teams don’t have that capability.”
When Nammour published blog posts about the team’s approach, the response was immediate. “Engineers from other companies began reaching out: ‘We’re building the same thing.’ ‘We’re struggling with the same tools,’” she said. “Those conversations made me realize how shared this problem was and sparked the idea for Teleskope.” Investors read the blogs too and even reached out to Nammour to tell her she should build it.
Growth and AI-powered expansion
Early validation for Teleskope came organically: some of the early blog readers became the company’s earliest customers. Three years in, Teleskope now serves dozens of enterprise and high-growth companies with another 22 in pilots. Growth, she says, is “accelerating exponentially.”
“In some cases, clients told us the cost of the Teleskope service was already paid back simply through savings on storage costs," M13’s Alomar said.
Teleskope’s focus on solving root problems continues to drive adoption. In August, the company launched Prism, its generative AI–powered product that delivers advanced summarization and categorization capabilities to unstructured data. Prism gives teams new visibility and precision – understanding information at the document level, surfacing business context (for example, identifying that a file contains HR data) and detecting non-traditional sensitive content such as intellectual property, financial projections and other proprietary data.
According to Arjun S., principal product manager at GoodRx, “This new capability empowers us to make smarter decisions, faster. Prism builds on everything we already value about Teleskope — the automation, the precision, the visibility — and adds a deeper layer of intelligence. We're better equipped to prioritize risk, cut through noise, and move forward with confidence on strategic initiatives through the use of Teleskope.”
Taking data security into the future
“With enterprise data risk increasing significantly in recent years, data security can’t be ignored,” Alomar said. “Teleskope has built a reliable track record of creating value relatively quickly, getting up and running and resolving risk for its customers.”
For chief information security officers (CISOs), remediation is non-negotiable. "Today, CISOs can be personally liable if a known issue isn’t addressed," Nammour said.
Looking ahead, Nammour sees agentic data security as the next frontier, where intelligent agents can understand and replicate the logic of security teams, apply business context and right-size data security to each organization. “Teleskope is about fixing problems end-to-end through intelligent automation,” she said.
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What this means for founders, technologists, and investors
- Teleskope automates remediation, not just detection, transforming how enterprises secure and manage sensitive data.
- The platform’s AI-driven design and execution meet the needs of today's security landscape, defined by data proliferation and complex regulatory demands.
- Customer adoption, operational savings, and rapid deployment validate both the technology and its business impact.
- As data risks and compliance pressures grow, Teleskope is emerging as both a problem solver and business enabler.
Read more about Teleskope
A pair of Airbnb alums is bringing intelligence and automation to data protection
Inside Teleskope: The Startup Protecting Data in the Age of AI
Investing in Teleskope and a New Data Future
Breaking Barriers and Forging Paths: The Inspiring Journey Of Teleskope’s Women Founders
Follow Telescope
Learn more at www.teleskope.ai or www.teleskope.ai/blog.
Follow the company on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/teleskopeai
Follow Elizabeth Nammour at www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethnammour.
Why we invested
Teleskope’s journey may be just beginning, but the three year old company is fast rewriting the rules for enterprise data security. The company is leading a shift from detection to automated remediation, helping organizations not just find data risks but fix them in real time. This is especially important as artificial intelligence accelerates data proliferation and amplifies the risks of exposure.
Four years ago, enterprises were already struggling with data sprawl problems, according to Nammour. Now with AI, it’s much easier for attackers to gain control of that sensitive data, search for sensitive data or for that data to get surfaced to them.
Teleskope is redefining data security by focusing on remediation rather than just detection so that customers don’t just see the problem but fix it automatically.
According to Karl Alomar, M13’s managing partner, that shift couldn’t be more timely.
Product innovation and automated remediation
From day one, Nammour’s north star was building security software that actually works.
Teleskope spent its first two years building, iterating and learning deeply from customers. The team found that most data security solutions are overly generic, flagging irrelevant risks and offering no clear path to remediation. Even when these tools identify real issues, they rarely provide insight into a company’s unique risk landscape or actionable next steps.
Teleskope takes a different approach. Its platform ingests and understands a company’s data security and management policies, then uses agentic automation to act with the intelligence and context of a human security team.
For example, it can detect data that hasn’t been accessed in a decade and safely delete it, lowering storage costs, reducing risk, and ensuring compliance with internal and regulatory data-retention rules.
Teleskope aims to go one step further by training its agents to ingest and enforce a company’s data management, security and privacy policies in real time. For Alomar, this is where Teleskope stands apart. "No other DSPM (data security posture management) offers end-to-end remediation. Everything is manual," he said. "What Lizzy and Teleskope have done is shift the security paradigm from dashboard and alerts to real fixes.”
From Airbnb to autonomous security
Nammour didn’t set out to be a security founder.
“Unlike cybersecurity leaders who come from military or traditional infosec backgrounds, I’m an operator at heart, a software engineer who loves to solve hard problems,” she said.
She joined Airbnb in 2017 as a software engineer and, through a "reverse pitch" team selection process, found herself in security. “When I joined the data security team, I realized how uniquely interesting the space is,” Nammour said. “It’s this mix of deeply technical challenges — like operating at petabyte scale and maintaining accuracy — intertwined with human and organizational complexity.”
That complexity is exactly what makes data security so difficult. Tools must operate at massive scale while understanding how a company works, something most tools fail to do. When faced with the challenge of data sprawl at Airbnb, Nammour’s team evaluated existing products but found them insufficient. “We started manually labeling hundreds of thousands of columns in our data warehouse,” she recalled. “It was clear that it didn't scale.”
So the team built an in-house solution, a luxury few companies can afford. “At Airbnb, we were fortunate that our security engineers were also software engineers, so we could build a platform ourselves,” she said. “But 99% of security teams don’t have that capability.”
When Nammour published blog posts about the team’s approach, the response was immediate. “Engineers from other companies began reaching out: ‘We’re building the same thing.’ ‘We’re struggling with the same tools,’” she said. “Those conversations made me realize how shared this problem was and sparked the idea for Teleskope.” Investors read the blogs too and even reached out to Nammour to tell her she should build it.
Growth and AI-powered expansion
Early validation for Teleskope came organically: some of the early blog readers became the company’s earliest customers. Three years in, Teleskope now serves dozens of enterprise and high-growth companies with another 22 in pilots. Growth, she says, is “accelerating exponentially.”
“In some cases, clients told us the cost of the Teleskope service was already paid back simply through savings on storage costs," M13’s Alomar said.
Teleskope’s focus on solving root problems continues to drive adoption. In August, the company launched Prism, its generative AI–powered product that delivers advanced summarization and categorization capabilities to unstructured data. Prism gives teams new visibility and precision – understanding information at the document level, surfacing business context (for example, identifying that a file contains HR data) and detecting non-traditional sensitive content such as intellectual property, financial projections and other proprietary data.
According to Arjun S., principal product manager at GoodRx, “This new capability empowers us to make smarter decisions, faster. Prism builds on everything we already value about Teleskope — the automation, the precision, the visibility — and adds a deeper layer of intelligence. We're better equipped to prioritize risk, cut through noise, and move forward with confidence on strategic initiatives through the use of Teleskope.”
Taking data security into the future
“With enterprise data risk increasing significantly in recent years, data security can’t be ignored,” Alomar said. “Teleskope has built a reliable track record of creating value relatively quickly, getting up and running and resolving risk for its customers.”
For chief information security officers (CISOs), remediation is non-negotiable. "Today, CISOs can be personally liable if a known issue isn’t addressed," Nammour said.
Looking ahead, Nammour sees agentic data security as the next frontier, where intelligent agents can understand and replicate the logic of security teams, apply business context and right-size data security to each organization. “Teleskope is about fixing problems end-to-end through intelligent automation,” she said.
What this means for founders, technologists, and investors
- Teleskope automates remediation, not just detection, transforming how enterprises secure and manage sensitive data.
- The platform’s AI-driven design and execution meet the needs of today's security landscape, defined by data proliferation and complex regulatory demands.
- Customer adoption, operational savings, and rapid deployment validate both the technology and its business impact.
- As data risks and compliance pressures grow, Teleskope is emerging as both a problem solver and business enabler.
Read more about Teleskope
A pair of Airbnb alums is bringing intelligence and automation to data protection
Inside Teleskope: The Startup Protecting Data in the Age of AI
Investing in Teleskope and a New Data Future
Breaking Barriers and Forging Paths: The Inspiring Journey Of Teleskope’s Women Founders
Follow Telescope
Learn more at www.teleskope.ai or www.teleskope.ai/blog.
Follow the company on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/teleskopeai
Follow Elizabeth Nammour at www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethnammour.
Read more
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